When using more than one CPU, Oracle Solaris 10 10/08, and Oracle Solaris 10 5/09 may take a long time to boot and may print warnings on the system console regarding failures to read from disk. This is a bug in Oracle Solaris 10 which affects specific physical and virtual configurations. It is caused by trying to read microcode updates from the boot disk when the disk interrupt is reassigned to a not yet fully initialized secondary CPU. Disk reads will time out and fail, triggering delays of about 45 seconds and warnings.

The recommended solution is upgrading to at least Oracle Solaris 10 10/09 which includes a fix for this problem. Alternative solutions include restricting the number of virtual CPUs to one or possibly using a different storage controller.